machinery for arriving at the facts, District by District. No such machinery has been available for the present work; and it only pretends to the degree of accuracy which intelligent officials on the spot can arrive at, without any statistical staff for sifting evidence or testing conclusions. My lists of inquiries were issued by the Government of Bengal in 1869-70, and during the next three years the District officers collected the information asked for. In some cases their reports have amounted to several hundred pages for a single District. As they came in, I tested them by the replies obtained from adjoining localities, and by personal inquiries in travelling through the Districts. Figures officially furnished to me by Heads of Departments or by Secretaries to Government have as a rule been accepted without verification. The proof-sheets of each volume, after being read by myself, have been revised by the Government before according its sanction to publication; and in some cases have been sent by it to the District Officers, with a view to obtaining their comments.
But notwithstanding these safeguards against error, the reader will find that on several points I have to warn him to accept my statistics as approximate estimates only; in other cases he will perhaps detect inaccuracies which have escaped my notice. The failures throughout a century of previous efforts (a single one of which had extended over seven years, and cost the East India Company £30,000) stand as warnings against excessive elaboration of any sort. I was ordered to produce an Account of each District, completed on a moderate scale, and within a very short time. The Provinces of Bengal and Assam have a population more varied in character and more numerous than that of England, Scotland, Ireland, Norway, Holland, Switzerland, and Italy put together. In three years I had to collect, without the help of a single paid local assistant, the information for this vast tract; and in four more years the compilation of the whole is to be finished, in addition to my work as Director-General of the whole operations throughout India. During the next fifteen months (1875-76),
